Drug Lord: I'm Not A Monster

'I Faulted God,' He Says After Getting Life In Prison

A hardened drug lord sobbed Friday in an Orlando federal courtroom as he told the judge who sentenced him to life behind bars that he is ''not a monster.''

''I want to tell you - all of you - that I did deal with drugs, but I'm not a monster,'' Jorge Alicea-Serrano said through an interpreter. ''I faulted God. That's the reason I'm here.''

Alicea, 43, was the mastermind behind one of the area's largest cocaine and heroin rings, which smuggled at least 61 tons of cocaine and 440 pounds of heroin from Puerto Rico to Central Florida.

Alicea was among 19 people indicted in November, but he was the final holdout - refusing to enter a guilty plea until just weeks before his trial was to begin.

He pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to import cocaine, distribution of the drug and money laundering.

In exchange for Alicea's plea, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Byron dropped 13 other charges against him, and the government agreed not to pursue charges against his mother and sister.

The other defendants, including his former wife, had pleaded earlier and already have been sentenced.

For federal and local agents who worked for four years to stop the drug ring, Alicea - a longtime fugitive who used the alias Noel Rosario - was the crown jewel.

As about a dozen agents watched Friday, the short, balding man told U.S. District Judge Anne Conway in a tearful, rambling speech that he was pressured into leading the drug ring.

He said he made a deal with God a few years ago that he would get out of drug dealing if God let his wife, who was seriously ill, live. His now-former wife lived, but Alicea said he didn't quit dealing because he owed some Puerto Rican dealers a lot of money.

''If they hadn't threatened me and my family, I wouldn't have returned back to drugs,'' he told Conway. The sentencing, he said, was God's way of paying him back.

Alicea also told the judge that he was disappointed by the life sentence, which in the federal system comes without parole. He said when he entered his plea that he thought he would be able to get out of prison one day and see his family.

Alicea's sentence was dictated by federal sentencing guidelines, which take into account a defendant's criminal past, the crimes committed and the amount of drugs involved.

Conway also increased the sentence after finding that Alicea didn't take full responsibility for his actions. While in jail, Alicea talked with other inmates about possibly breaking out.

Since 1990, Alicea headed a ring that used boat crews to pick up 440 pounds of heroin and 61 tons of cocaine dropped from Colombian drug planes off Puerto Rico's southern coast.

The drugs were sent by mail and in 35-pound shipments in airline luggage to Orlando, where they were shipped to Miami and New York. Sixty-one tons of cocaine is worth hundreds of millions of dollars at current wholesale prices.

The sting was the result of a four-year probe by a task force of Orange County deputies, the Metropolitan Bureau of Police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service, FBI and postal inspectors.